Yahoo! Privacy: Tricky Web Beacons (somewhat scary too!)

Thanks to a heads-up from an online friend, I discovered the Yahoo! Privacy Center. This is the site where Yahoo! shows their privacy policy. The site shows howYahoo! intends to use the personal information it got from you when you signed up for *any* service Yahoo! currently offer. All's well and good since this means that Yahoo! really takes care of your personal information. Or do they?

However, scrolling down a few paragraphs under the "Cookies" header, the policy starts talking about how Yahoo! uses "web beacons" to access Yahoo! cookies inside and outside their network! Does this mean that Yahoo! is using spyware technology to track the web activities of its members? I personally don't know if that is indeed the case but good thing they offered a way to Opt Out of this web beacons feature. By clicking on the "web beacons" link on the Yahoo! Privacy site (or here), you will be sent to another page where they "thoughtfully" provide a link to allow you to opt out of the web beacon service. All's well and good right?

Not really! After clicking on the opt-out link, a page wil be displayed saying "You have opted out successfully" but there's something funny about the page, under "You have opted out successfully", a prominent button saying "Cancel opt out" is displayed while a less prominent link saying "Return to Yahoo! Privacy" is directly below it. Tricky!

I moonlighted as a programmer early in my career and one of the things that I learned then was in order to "guide" a user to use a feature on a program (or in this case a website), the button or link you want your user to click on should be prominently displayed, making it easy for the user to make the correct decision. This is what Yahoo! did in its Opt Out acknowledgement page. They don't exactly want you to opt out so they prominently displayed the "Cancel Opt Out" button hoping that you will automatically click on the button instead of the link below that button. Real Tricky!

Another tricky thing that Yahoo! has done on this system is that users should opt out on *all* browser that they are using. It means that if you are a power user like me and uses various browsers (I use at least five browsers: FireFox, Ghostzilla, Safari, Camino, and IE), you'll need to opt out using all those browsers! You have more problems if you use Yahoo! services and use them on multiple machines. Definitely Tricky!

I am not jumping to conclusion nor am I trying to spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) among the readers of this blog. But I personally went through all the browsers I use and opted out of this "web beacons" service since I prefer to keep a certain amount of anonymity whenever I surf the 'Net.

technorati tags: web, security, yahoo